TRAVERSE CITY — Traverse City Central High School is among a small group of Michigan high schools recognized for the high number of female students enrolled in one of its Advanced Placement computer science courses.
CHS was awarded the College Board Advanced Placement Computer Science Female Diversity Award for its 2021 AP Computer Science-A course. The 1,500-student high school is one of 199 schools in the country and one of seven schools in Michigan to receive the award in 2021 for the AP Computer Science-A course.
The award is given to schools that have either 50 percent or higher female exam taker representation in an AP computer science course or a percentage of female computer science exam takers that meets or exceeds that of the school’s female population.
Twenty-seven Michigan Schools received the same award in 2021 for AP Computer Science Principles, including Elk Rapids High School and St. Francis High School.
AP Computer Science Principles covers a broad range of topics, from programming to cyber security. In AP Computer Science A, students learn more coding, including the coding language JavaScript.
Jim Baran, who teaches computer science and engineering courses at Central High School, said he was surprised to hear one of his classes won an award; he did not know the honor existed.
However, he has focused on recruiting more students to his computer science classes during his time at CHS. Baran said he works with CHS’s school counselors and local TCAPS middle schools with computer science classes and programs to encourage more students to get involved in computer science courses.
Before Baran joined CHS’s teaching staff, there were no computer science courses offered at the high school. During the past five years at CHS, he has watched his classes grow little by little each year.
He said he also wants kids to be aware of the opportunities that computer science and STEM in general can offer them in the workforce and get them exposed to the content early on so they can develop a level of comfort and confidence in the topic.
“Not everybody is going to be a programmer, but, in your future endeavors, you’re going to have some aspect of computer science in your life,” Baran said. “Being able to, not necessarily just use an app but understand how things work, is going to be beneficial.”
Prior to his career in teaching, Baran worked for Samsung as a product strategy manager. He said he has seen firsthand how important diversity is in positions such as this and fields in STEM.
“Teams that are more diverse, they develop better solutions,” Baran said. “You think about different viewpoints, stakeholders, different use cases.”
Alexandra Maxwell, a senior at CHS who was in the computer science course that won the award, said she has always been interested in computer science. As a young kid, she took summer classes learning how to use Scratch, a basic, building block coding platform that mostly teaches basic principles of coding through online games.
Now, she is taking STEM classes through Northwestern Michigan College to finish out her senior year and looking to study computer science in college. She said she is drawn to computer science, and particularly Artificial Intelligence, because there is still so much to be explored.
“There’s just so much you can do with it,” Maxwell said. “It’s such a fast-growing field that literally it can be applied to any profession or part of life.”
Zakyah Ellis, a CHS senior, is taking AP Computer Science-A this year. She said she is thinking of studying computer science engineering or software engineering in college and is particularly interested in how computer science can help people and bridge the gap of the digital divide.
“I’ve always been interested in how everyday things we use work and how to also help people using technology,” Ellis said.
Brynn Roy, another CHS senior who was in the class that won the award, said she picked up the AP computer science courses because she liked some engineering courses she took earlier in high school but wanted to learn more coding.
This year, Roy is taking a class through NMC to learn the programming language Python, and she hopes to study computational mathematics in college.
“It’s problem-solving — that’s what it comes down to,” Roy said. “That’s why I love math … There’s no real right or wrong in a sense, because you can do something in multiple different ways and still get a correct answer.”
While, according to College Board, AP Computer Science-A has grown in female participation in the past few years, women still make up a small percentage of degree earners and workers in computer science and engineering.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wage for jobs in computer and information technology was $91,250 in 2020. Women earn 18 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees and make up 28 percent of the science and engineering workforce, according to the National Girls Collaborative Project.
During the summer of 2021, Roy participated in a coding program through Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that works to increase the number of women in computer science. To her, Roy said diversity in STEM is important because it brings in new dimensions of problem-solving.
“It brings in new ways of looking at problems,” Roy said. “You have people who come from different backgrounds and have different perspectives, which allow you to obviously solve problems in different ways that can be better and help whatever you’re working on.”
